Friday, 27 January 2012

In Leon’s experience, it came down to who you could trust. The
City’s intelligence organisation, run by the Tin Man, had been compromised, to
what level he couldn’t say.

His own organisation may have been compromised too. And it
made him feel like the Tin Man to admit that, to make the decision to go alone.
Teams were key, teams provided balance.

Scarecrow had located Dorothy, he had bugged the vehicles at
the original location, but he hadn’t reported in since and there were dangerous
men in the City. Playing pieces not usually on the board. Leon feared the
worse.

Leon had followed one of Scarecrow’s trackers to this
warehouse. He soothed the building’s security network, kept it calm, wrapped it
around him like a warm blanket. It wouldn’t tell on him, he was its invisible
friend, its secret.

He nearly tripped over the first body, concealed in the
shadows behind a fuel reserve.

The corpse wasn’t local security caught in the wrong place
at the wrong time; it was a mercenary, hired by the enemy, which meant there
was someone else here. Leon asked gentle questions of the security, not wanting
to push their friendship too far. But all he got back was a ghost, as if he had
cast a shadow into his own future. A shadow with wetwork skills.

He found another two guards on the way up to the roof. Their
uplinks were still feeding active data, a video loop of a patrol pattern, a
heartbeat that no longer existed. It was high level stuff, but the internal
security must be skeletal to miss this trick. Or distracted.

The next body was tucked in a corner on the rooftop. Not
dead, but breathing raggedly, on the edge of consciousness, on the precipice of
death. He recognised the face beneath the black streaks of masking make-up.

“Scarecrow.”

“Hey, Boss.”

****

Dorothy blinked. Everything was blurred, everything felt out
of sync. She remembered shadows, dreams and ghosts. Bloodshed and bloodlust. A
darkness nesting in her soul.

The bright lights shimmered above her, painful, piercing.
Her head felt as if it had been cracked open and driven through with nails.

Her last clear thought was the General in front of her, on
his knees. Then, nothing, a long night full of demons. Someone was looking down
at her. She tried to move, she was lying flat, straps at her arms and legs, a
firm cushion beneath her.

She blinked rapidly, trying to focus.

“She’s waking. Well done, Doctor, it seems you succeeded on
both counts. You really are a wizard.”

Dorothy knew that voice, she had hunted that voice for
years.

“General.” She managed to slur as her vision swam and
cleared.

And there he was, looking down at her, head bandaged, but
smiling horribly.

“Siberian, come and say hello.”

The Siberian. She had heard rumours of the General’s
shadowy, left-hand man.

Another figure stepped into her vision. Dark eyes gazed
coldly down at her from a face she recognised.

Friday, 20 January 2012

Scarecrow rolled beneath Munch’s oversized fist. He felt the
air shifting past his face, as it might with a passing freight train.

These were not your average thugs. He remembered seeing a
file on them many years ago, suppositions without evidence, unproved theories,
trolls unseen beneath burning bridges. Up close they were every bit as dangerous
as he had imagined. Big, fast and coordinated. He’d never come up against
anything quite like it.

But they’d never come up against anything quite like him.

Combat was a dream to Scarecrow. His body did what needed to
be done while his mind, separate, observed, calculated, advised. Time seemed to
slow. The agency scientists had packed his head with all kinds of software and
hardware, but if he was honest, fighting had always been like that.

The big one, Munchkin, was his primary target. And while
the two of them were engaged the others stepped up only to knock him back and keep him close
to those deadly slabs of fist. Munch’s team were too experienced to all step in
at once and muddle themselves. They read the fight and kept it ringed, kept it
dangerous.

Scarecrow’s flow faltered for a moment as he dodged a
stamp from one scarred ugly, then vaulted over the leader’s kick and came
face-to-face with the same scarred ugly, who couldn’t possibly have moved so fast.

A fist thundered into his back and ploughed him face first
into Ugly’s chest. Twins. His mind caught up. He had to start taking these
people down. As the man in front went to grab him into a crushing bear hug he
scythed his hand upwards with fingers straight and braced, wrist twisting.

He tore the man’s throat out.

Twisting away from the spray of blood, he felt it wash down
his back as he dived and curled. There was a roar from behind. Twins. Perfect.
The second Ugly lumbered straight at him, blood-raged and clumsy, careening
into Munchkin and throwing them both down.

Scrarecrow slipped under the kick of a man with disturbingly
onyx eyes, prosthetics. But in a fight you needed narrow vision, seeing too
much only confused matters. He jabbed at the back of the man’s knee, in just
the right spot, crippling him for months, if not permanently. The same move
brought him towards the fifth thug, his other hand knifing for the man’s
crotch.

Number five caught his hand, had been watching his hands the
whole time, Scarecrow realised too late. Before he could shake him free the man
flexed his strong fingers just so, and Scarecrow felt two of his own fingers
dislocate. With another twist, splintering bones burst through the skin of his
little finger.

He grunted as he pulled free and danced back, free from the
circle, but not from danger. Two down for the loss of one hand. It wasn’t good.

Twin number two – number one and only, now – was up again,
and charging.

****

The Siberian held a memory implant, sealed in a sterile pouch,
in front of Dorothy’s face.

“I was going to keep this as a trophy, but now I think I’ll
put it back where it came from.”

He slapped her, but it did nothing to bring her back from
her sweating, moaning state; her eyes rolled and her eyelids fluttered.

“Oh, I know, you’re not yourself. Well, not to worry. We’ll
have the General out of your head soon enough. Then we’ll put you back
together. And when I kill you, I’ll make sure you’re dead. Which was more than
you ever did for me.”

****

Leon stood in the General’s cell. The General’s empty cell.

The Tin Man finished talking to one of his men and walked
over.

“They had insider knowledge. Some of
the information was outdated, but with a little inside help it was enough to
get him out and vanished.”

“How many down?” Leon always thought of the losses.

“Four dead, two critical, two missing.”

“Assume the missing two are your traitors, there’s no reason
for hostages.”

“My thoughts, too.”

“Trackers?”

“Disabled. Including the official backups, and my own
backups.”

“Someone knows you, Tin Man.”

“Someone does.”

Leon noted the suspicion in those grey eyes. So the Tin Man
had involved him to keep an eye on him. Or to make Leon believe he suspected
him, to draw suspicion away from himself.

They had trusted each other once. The
game certainly had changed, it had changed both of them. Sometimes it didn’t matter how well you played; against an
equal opponent, it all came down to the endgame.

Friday, 13 January 2012

“Hello, Dorothy. So nice to see you again.” The Siberian’s
smile was cold as the tundra.

Dorothy was strapped into a wheel chair but that didn’t stop
her from twitching and bucking. The Siberian took hold of her chin and looked
into her eyes. Something was happening in there, chaos, confusion and pain, a
conflict the General himself would have been proud of. Would be proud of, when
he was back.

“That was quite inconvenient of you to run away before you
were delivered to your proper destination. But no matter, you’re here now.”

“Si-, Si-” Her voice was breathy, delirious.

“Siberian. Our money.”

He looked up at Munchkin and his neo-gangsters. They seemed
very much at home in this shadowy, under-lit warehouse. The Siberian pulled one
of his encrypted accounts into his vision, he made a few gestures and the
balance blinked to nothing. With another gesture an automated program deleted
the account.

“Thank you, Gentlemen, Munchkin. You have been exemplary,
every bit the equal of your reputation.”

He waited patiently while the huge man gestured to himself,
confirming the transfer.

As Munch was finishing, an urgent, red signal blinked across
the Siberian’s display. He expanded it. He watched a tiny loop of video showing
the back of a man in a black insertion suit vaulting a high fence. The intruder
had almost avoided the camera, had definitely avoided several others and two alarm
systems.

A pause and zoom showed tufts of blonde hair sprouting from
the edge of the black headgear. Scarecrow.

“If you don’t mind, Gentlemen.”

They looked back at him.

“One last job, for a little spending money?”

****

The Tin Man’s office was on the thirty third floor of a
non-descript tower block. The first ten floors were offices for hire; anyone
could hire them, after a deep audit and assessment. Nothing above those floors
was accessible from the lobby or stairwells of that building. To get any higher
you had to enter through the considerably stronger security of the building
across the street, use the heavily-guarded private subway and take the other lift.

His office could only be entered by way of a waiting room,
replete with comfy wall seats, stylish tables, secretary and an exceptional,
combat-experienced security team. There was a long corridor ending in a door
with a keypad, full bio-scan and virtual handshake that would only admit the
Tin Man. No one was ever allowed in the corridor with him. Guests had to be
admitted by him, and only when he was already in the room.

The Tin Man entered. His suit was just the right shade of
grey to compliment his silvering hair, it was subtly expensive: the material,
the cut, the tailoring. He was, of course, perfectly turned out. He sat at his
desk and, for the first time, he did not power up all the hardware; he did not
call taskings and messages and operational summaries into his retinal displays.

Instead, he leant forward, his elbows on the desk, his chin
resting on his interlaced fingers. The network of fine creases across his face
deepened with intense thought. He did not shift for several minutes.

“You are getting rusty, Tin Man. Look at you, stuck there.”

The Tin Man did not startle easily. He barely moved. His
thin lips stretched in a slow smile.

“And you have gotten bold, Lion.”

Leon stepped through the recessed doorway from the en suite
bathroom. He walked slowly over to the chair on the other side of the desk and
seated himself.

“You went to see the General.”

“Huh. I knew you would be thorough.” The Tin Man nodded,
respectfully. “I had to see him for myself. I thought I might kill him.”

“I don’t know if I would have been so restrained. A man
never forgives the murder of his son.”

“I know. But his chip is missing, it isn’t The General in
that room.”

“That, I know.” Leon levelled his gaze at the Tin Man, “Dorothy
has the chip.”

Friday, 6 January 2012

Leon settled against the bow of an ancient oak tree. The breeze stirred a
chill through his suit; a feeling he would have enjoyed when he was younger,
but now it made him feel cold, and old. He rubbed his eyes, before implants
that would have taken the world away, with an implant there were the datafeeds
you saw without looking, ever-present.

The General’s video feed had been tampered with. Not the
fake feed that would fool most prying eyes, but the genuine feed. A segment had
been replaced with a loop, hard to spot in the General’s catatonic-like state, a
very professional job. Even the backup archive had been fixed.

But there was a fourth redundancy, one the Tin Man had
installed that no one else was supposed to know about. Now Leon had the missing
minutes of video.

He opened the file.

The General stared
blankly at his cell wall, smiling his infuriating, oblivious smile.

Leon rubbed his temples. Most people’s brains stored
memories randomly between biological and hard memory space, between the brain
and their implant. Once the implant was installed and connected the brain
didn’t seem to differentiate between grey cells and the bio-silicate.

Early in The General’s life he had been caught in an
explosion when his home town was shelled. His parents were killed and he
suffered severe brain damage. Before implants he would have had no life at all,
no memories, no thoughts. Medical technology had changed that and Leon wondered
if this one saved mind hadn’t caused more misery and pain than all that was
prevented elsewhere. Maybe the world had to be balanced... But if he believed
that, he wouldn’t be trying to make the world a better place, every day.

Without that implant The General was nobody, a ship with no
captain, a bomb with no boom. Not a bad thing, on the whole, Leon thought,
except there was no justice in that. The General had to be brought to account
for all he had inflicted. He didn’t deserve such sweet oblivion.

On the lost minutes of video feed the door to the General’s
cell opened and, preceded by the flick of his cane, the Tin Man walked in.

****

She awoke from a vision of beating a man until he couldn’t
tell her what he knew, even if he wanted to. As the images of his lumpy, broken
face seeped from her mind she rolled over and vomited.

The geriatric building grumbled and wheezed around her. It had
seen a few things, forgotten most of them. Her shaking, sweating body and
shattered mind was nothing new. It huffed about the cracks in its walls and its
broken windows. It groaned about its infirm foundations. It mumbled to itself
about its lousy tenants as they moved and lived and shouted around inside it.

She listened as it talked to itself. It was a comfort. A
doddering, old spirit holding her in its arms.

And so she heard its querulous muttering at the strangers in
its belly. Newcomers, as she had been, but these weren’t trying to hide, these
were making themselves known, they were intruding and enquiring.

And she knew what they were looking for.

The window wasn’t a viable option here. The outside of the
building was as likely to drop her as save her. It was old, crotchety and
crumbling. Once, she would have known exactly where she was going, would have
had escape routes and exit strategies. Now she was running on instinct and
fear, and confusion.

Down the corridor was an end window with a corroded fire
escape, still clinging to the building by cracking, iron finger nails. As she
ran to it something huge loomed across the open window. A large man in a dark
suit climbed unsteadily in. The fire escape shook and let out a creak of relief
as he stepped off and into the corridor.

He caught sight of her and grinned.

“Well. Look at this.”

She ran at him. The surprise on his face was gone in a
second, and the grin was back, darker.

A part of her tried to fight with strength she didn’t have,
had never had. Another part of her tried to fight with a speed and skill that
was second nature to her, when her body wasn’t so run down and strung out.

The heavy was fast for his size, and brutal with his
strength. He wasn’t relying on all his strikes connecting and she landed
several of her own before she caught a hammer blow to the ribs that slammed her
sideways into the wall with a rattle of plaster. He was on her instantly, the
next punch rocketing at her head, but she twisted and his knuckles crunched
into flaking paintwork.

She landed a few hard, targeted jabs while he was over her,
pressure points and an eye. He howled and crumpled in on himself.

She twisted out from beneath him and registered heavy
footsteps thundering towards them from the stairwell. Time to go. She dashed
for the open window and the shaky, unsure deliverance of the fire escape.

Something heavy closed about her ankle.

No!

A warm, meaty fist held her in place. There was a pained
chuckle from the man on the floor and as she looked back another suited man,
bigger even than the first, threw himself at her.

Fiction should take on a life of its own in people's minds. Anything I write should become a seed that germinates in your mind and grows into something more. I give you fragments and hope to inspire your imagination to create wider worlds.